Reading The Dark Side, as I just have, forces a stomach-turning, jaw-clenching reckoning with Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, CIA kidnappings, secret prisons, waterboarding, and a shameful list of other soul-shattering abuses.

How to explain an administration that nationalizes the banking system even as it praises the free market? How to explain a financial system that turned debt into wealth, and wealth into debt? How is it that most people don't even know which country their house belongs to?

Rubin's rosy picture is contradicted by the same unnamed advocates who point out that there are "underlying legal problems with the detentions themselves and the lack of legal rights afforded to detainees."

There are smoking guns for our prisoner abuse everywhere but people pretend they don't exist. How many torture memos does an administration have to promulgate before the public gets the idea they are promulgating torture?

Just saw Errol Morris' Abu Ghraib documentary and it blew me away: the focussed concentration on the soldiers narrating those infamous pictures, each soldier framed alone on a wide-screen, calm and expressive.